it's 10:21 pm, on December 13, 2016 - -.

~

there are a lot of terrible things coming out of Aleppo the last few days and I've been alternating between heavily disguised panic and deep sorrow. tl:dr I grew up in a place where the news meant nothing, was propaganda, I spent time as a child - as a safe outsider child - being desensitized to the horror of every day violence in a warzone.

in some ways because of that, I think this hurts worse; because nothing that has happened in the last fifteen years of slowly escalating violence has been a shock to me, none of it. not any attacks, not the vicious media reactions. not the indifference. not the heartwarming, sorrowful stories coming five years too late. not the blame. not the hands-off horror.

i look at pictures of aleppo and think of seeing [redacted], husks of buildings left out for wind to scour them down like middle kingdom pyramids. that was a university, thirty years ago, you think, and now it looks like it could be ramses' tomb.

the gall of thinking our feelings matter, our sorrow is too big to fill these cups. this isn't sorrow, america, it's shame, and sometimes I think you should be forced to eat it.

I'm a little angry at the news, these days, and more angry at-- at everyone. myself.

we are, at once, desensitized
and yet so fragile, unbelieving the horrors of the world
were unleashed from our own cupped hands.

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things aren't going so well, here, as you might have guessed, frienemies; I feel like I'm slowly unravelling. but then again, they're going better here than anywhere else on the globe, and I don't know what that says about us.

~

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- - May 18, 2017
- - May 11, 2017
- - May 10, 2017
- - May 05, 2017
- - December 24, 2016

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